The Ceremony and the Swimmer: China Watches the Olympics

The People’s Daily, the flagship of China’s state-run media empire, tried, in all honesty, to make sense of the opening ceremony at the London Olympics—an event, the paper noted, that cost not only a fraction of the opening ceremony four years ago in Beijing, but even less than a quarter of what Qatar spent on the opening of the Asian Games in Doha. “This might have something to do with British frugality,” wondered the voice of the paper’s official social-media feed. Or, it went on sympathetically, “it could be the result of the European debt crisis.” The government news service was less generous in its assessment, headlining its review: “Opening Ceremony Very British, Not Very Olympic, Lacking Vital Elements.”

Four years after China whipped itself into a lather to host the most boffo Olympics imaginable, China seems, these days, a bit startled to discover that anyone is bothering to try hosting the Games again. Even so, the opening ceremony won its share of Chinese fans who, unsurprisingly, watched the affair with one eye on themselves. As the Brits celebrated some of their best-known inventions—the Beatles, Bond—people in China pointed that when Beijing’s organizers, in 2008, ticked off their inventions, the list dwindled after the ancient era (compass, paper, etc.): “In modern history, what have we had to offer?” one commentator asked. “Have we come up anything that’s been recognized?” If that sounds a bit self-critical, the insecurity about innovation was a frequent theme in Chinese discussion of the Games, as was the observation that China’s armies of migrant workers—who built the stadiums—did not receive quite the recognition Brits afforded their counterparts: “I searched all over the Internet, and I couldn’t find a single portrait of a Chinese construction worker from the 2008 Olympics. In fact, many of them were kicked out of Beijing because they didn’t have a residency permit!”

As with so much on the Chinese Web these days, viewers were unsparing in their criticism of the state media. After China Central Television narrated—deadpan—the images of “the Queen” parachuting from a helicopter, there was a wave of admiring comments about her fortitude at the age of eighty-six. It took an impressively long time before a ripple of recognition swept across the commentariat: “CCTV, why didn’t you say something!”

Even as people debated whether the British approach was motivated by frugality or bankruptcy, the conversation pointed to deeper issues of governance. Li Yinhe, the prominent sociologist, argued that the different levels of splendor show “there is a different willingness to spend tax-payer money. Our government should really take stock itself on that.” By contrast, China’s patriots, who flourished in the run-up to the Games four years ago, set out to beat back the wave of self-criticism, pointing out that Danny Boyle’s history was selective:

The British colonized the world for half a century; how many people did they kill? How many slaves did they trade? After they had shed blood in accumulating capital, and then finished industrialization and modernization ahead of the world, they started to require other countries to be democratic, egalitarian, and environmentalist…. What is this other than a political pageant of hypocrisy?

Running through much of the Chinese conversation about the Games has been a recurring question that reflects the broader debate unfolding around the strains in China’s economic boom: What kind of values does it all—the money, the pageantry, the gold medals—stand for, anyway? In 2008, the opening ceremonies were, by any measure, an astonishment. But rather than contenting themselves with a fireworks display fit for the ages, for instance, organizers digitally augmented the explosions on television screens to make them yet more resplendent (and, indeed, a fat target for criticism). When it came to the singing, designers enlisted the recorded voice of one child and the smiling face of another, a search for composite cuteness that suggested, to many in China, a kind of unhinged ambition for the appearance of success.

The debate over artifice and authenticity resumed this week when the sixteen-year-old swimmer Ye Shiwen shattered expectations and immediately provoked a debate about whether China had taken a Tour-de-France approach to the swimming events this time, recalling an embarrassing doping program in the nineties when more than forty Chinese swimmers tested positive for steroids. Triggering the suspicion this time was the sheer scale of Ye’s success: it was not just that she broke a world record in the four-hundred-metre individual medley, at age sixteen, or improved in the event by seven seconds since last year; she swam her final fifty metres faster than Ryan Lochte swam his on the way to winning the men’s four-hundred-metre medley.

To some viewers, that was hardly evidence to indict: China has been having success in these Games, no matter how you measure it, with Sun Yang’s racking up medals in men’s swimming, and the men’s gymnastics team trouncing the competition with such ease that it is “making fools of everyone who wrote them off after a dismal performance in qualifying,” according to the Associated Press. Moreover, as A.P. sports columnist John Leicester, a longtime pool buff, points out, China has been preparing for swimming success the old-fashioned way: with money! It has been handing “big checks at some of swimming’s sharpest minds … to get their coaching programs, expertise and methods, not only to hone its swimming stars but to make them more rounded and relaxed, too. The idea is that happy swimmers are fast swimmers.”

Skeptics abound. They pointed not only to the Chinese doping cases of the nineties, but also to the fact that another sixteen-year-old Chinese swimmer tested positive for doping earlier this year. John Leonard, a top U.S. swimming official, said Ye “looks like Superwoman” and called her performance “impossible.” However this turns out, one can’t help but feel sorry for Ye, who was left to tell the scrum of reporters: “I just carry on and try my best.”

When it comes to the doping allegations, even China’s cynical online masses are notably supportive of the homeland. (“Are the Brits so old and stuffy that they don’t even believe in miracles anymore?”) But even if Ye’s win did not have the benefit of chemical assistance, some wondered if China’s approach to the Games has lost sight of a less measurable part of the Olympic experience. One of the most popular Chinese posts circulating online this week says: “The Chinese team came to the Olympics like a professional gambler arriving for a casual weekend of mah-jong, then trying to go home with everyone’s money.”

It was in that spirit that, between all the clips of glory and greatness being swapped among Chinese fans, another kind of scene was attracting attention: when the weightlifter Wu Jingbiao missed out on a gold medal a couple of days ago, he cried, despairingly, in front of the camera, reminding Chinese viewers of the pressure to win gold in the name of the motherland. He said, of his silver medal, “I feel ashamed to face my country and my team.”

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